The Lord Laughs (Psalm 72:8)

 

Thursday, July 31, 2025

Psalm 59

2 Samuel 12:15b-31

John 9:18-38

Observances: Joseph of Arimathea; Ignatius of Loyola, priest and founder of the Society of Jesus (d. 1556)

The Lord Laughs (Psalm 72:8)

But you, O Lord, laugh at them;
    you hold all the nations in derision.

Asking for help is one of those things I don’t think any of us really enjoy. I feel like most of us are more noble than we like to give ourselves credit for, and would be willing to help out someone else, at least a little bit, were they to ask. But to be on the receiving end – not so much. Add to that sense of noble graciousness we all have some awareness of is an instinctive reaction against what today’s Psalmist prays for – that the Lord would bring down his enemies in a spectacularly shameful way. If asking for help is difficult, asking for help against someone else is even more difficult.

Yet there may be a time where the whole world is against us. The superscription for this Psalm is that David composed it when he was hiding from Saul. And you can imagine him curled over his lamp at night, with a sheet over his head, hearing his enemies stalking the streets, taunting him, searching for him, as he writes these words. The difficulty for the Christian comes from the fact that our Lord has quite clearly taught us to pray for our enemies, and so taking these words on our own lips seems just a little bit too far in the opposite direction.

When it comes to the Psalms, they don’t hide from the wide range of human experience. They are confronting because they are brutally honest. Sometimes, in our lesser moments, we may wish for those against us to get their just desserts. And so Psalms like this one help us put those feelings into holy words.

The Lord is above all, and the Lord is the one who gets to hand out just desserts. Our job is to focus on our own souls, and God is here to help us with that. If we are under pressure from other people, we don’t have to go and sort things out ourselves. We ask God to do it: and he will. How he sorts it out is up to him. But we have permission to lay our fears and problems before him in an honest way.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to hide from someone else? How does God work in that sort of situation?

God of the nations, in whose hands are every human soul: guard and protect us from our enemies and those who would hurt us, that we may rejoice in your protection, and rely on you for our salvation in every circumstance.